A widening, and a cause this reading will not accept

Choi Byeong-cheon’s 2022 book Good Inequality is the work in view, and no name is supplied here. What it does give is a period and a refusal. From 1994 to 2008, this reading writes, inequality in the Korean economy widened. Those were the years of Kim Young-sam, Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun, three presidents who had, in this telling, taken part in the democratisation movement. Under Roh, progressive parties including the Democratic Labour Party, progressive intellectuals, civic groups and the progressive press attacked the government for having widened inequality. The author, this reading says, does not accept that this happened because those governments used chaebol-biased policy, neoliberal policy, or an overuse of irregular work.

The cause, instead, is four shocks acting in a chain between 1987 and 2008, which widened inequality and then set it firm. Around that chain a dual structure hardened: core and periphery in the labour market, large firms and small ones, exports and domestic demand, manufacturing and services, good jobs and bad jobs. The dates and the refusal stay in the window this reading gives, not recast as a later official total for 2026.

1987 and 1997 at home, 1992 and 2001 from China

The shock of 1987 is the democratisation of labour. It broke, this reading writes, the “authoritarian solidarity wage” of the Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan years — a wage equality that military dictatorship had imposed — and, on the base of democratic company unions, encouraged wage inequality. The starting point of today’s economic inequality, in this account, is democratisation itself in 1987. Inequality arrived, they write, together with the direct election of the president and with the three labour rights.

The shock of 1992 is a reordering of the international division of labour: China’s rise, and the establishment of Korea–China diplomatic ties. Korea, they say, caught the early phase of that rise, helped by the Northern Policy of the Roh Tae-woo government, and by historical and cultural closeness, geographic proximity, and similar industrial structures. From the 1990s on, good things and bad things in the Korean economy are, in this telling, tightly tied to the Chinese economy: China’s rapid growth widened Korean inequality, and also brought high growth and a higher standing as a country. The shock of 1997 is a sharp cut in debt ratios; the shock of 2001 is a boom in exports to China, whose gains, this reading adds, went more to people in exports, manufacturing, and large firms.

A ladder, the elderly, and three directions

Against that hardened dual structure this reading records three directions for economic policy: stronger competitiveness; a restoration of dynamism through a social ladder; and a narrowing of inequality by improving the lot of the socioeconomically weak. The ladder, they say, means that the state should actively help even the children of the poor working class to be joined to changes in the outside world. And the core of Korea’s inequality, in this telling, is a problem of the elderly, so the narrowing is to be built around a response to super-ageing. Whether one accepts the diagnosis or not, the four shocks are the spine this reading asks a reader to keep in view. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. This reading, a student reading of the book they title 좋은 불평등, with the four shocks left in the 1987–2008 window this reading gives, and with no author named because no author is named there.

Last updated: 15 November 2026